An article about the plague of measuring social media success is found in ClickZ. The article mentions four major hurdles toward effective measurement of social media. The main problems are:

• success and concrete measurement on social media is still hard
• mainly rely on the number of  “fan” or ” like” as a measurement of popularity and success
• ROI  is the top challenge , hard to measure
• uncertain about which tool to use

This is a common problem. Even though it is hard to get the exact or very firm answer for the questions above, the article does suggest some methods to improve the effectiveness of measurement:

• Interaction with your fans: it is not just the number of fans which matter to a brand. It is how influential they are that matters. Brands should interact with the fans to increase brand awareness and interaction.
• Go beyond Brand’Metrics: use more analytic tools or combine social media. the more tools applied , the better result we can get.
• Integrate social analytics and marketing analytics : utilize social media to make spending more effective , generate buzz to improve overall marketing performance